The Disturbing Case Of The Pine Forest Vanishings

Ugh, I hate Mondays. King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Swirl Bite? Uh, Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm. Hey, let's get back to work, please. But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites. Taylor Hansen? Nice. Try one. Mmm. King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites. There's nothing like it. Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light, and slowly the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it layer by layer until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross. My wife walked into the woods on the 14th of December, 1889. She had our son in her arms. Neither of them came back. I've had 40 years to work out how to tell this. I still don't know how to make it make sense, because it doesn't. We lived in a village called Hollow Parish. Our cottage was the last house in it. You stood at the door, and I stood at the door. I stood at the back fence, and there was nothing but trees for miles. Nobody farmed that side. Nobody ever had. I was 27 that autumn. Mary was 25, married two years. Thomas was three months old, good baby, slept through most nights with his fist curled against his cheek. I worked the land. Out back, we had a vegetable garden, rows of turnips and cabbage still holding into September, a woodpile stacked on the ground. I parked chest-high against the south wall, an outhouse maybe 30 yards from the back door. Past that, the fence. Past the fence, the trees. We had a dog, working dog, not a pet, big brown thing, broad chest, bark you could hear from the road. I chained him in the yard at night for the foxes. He'd curl up by the woodpile and sleep and bark if something came near the coop. Two years he'd done that without trouble. Hollow Parish was small. Stone Church, a pub with a ceiling so low, tall men ducked. A general store that smelled of flour and lamp oil and dried tobacco. Maybe 15 families on the road. Nearest market town was half a day by cart. We knew everybody. Edgar Burroughs was our closest neighbor, next cottage to the east. He was 63, bad knees that cracked when he stood, lived alone since his wife passed. Friendly enough, but kept to himself. He'd been in the parish his whole life, longer than anyone. That September, the cold came early, weeks ahead of where it should have been. I was stacking wood before the month was out, a job I normally saved for mid-October. Frost in the mornings at first, just a silver film on the grass, then thicker, hard enough to crunch under my boots at dawn. It got dark early. The birds left sooner than I'd known before. Swallows first, then the field fairs. By the first week of October, the woods had gone quiet. No crows in the high branches, no rustling in the undergrowth, no sound coming out of the tree line at all. Just that dark wall of pines, standing there in silence. I didn't think about it. Animals leave when the cold comes. Mary and I had a good life. We had enough to eat, enough wood for winter, a healthy child. The cottage was warm when the fire was going. Mary sang to Thomas in the evenings while I scraped my boots by the door and the smell of whatever she'd cooked hung in the air. We were not careless people. We just lived where we lived. It was a Thursday night in the second week of October. I'd been at the pub with John Aldous and his brother, sat by the fire drinking ale that tasted of smoke and grain. Walked home along the village road with my collar up and my breath coming out. White in front of me. Mary and Thomas were already asleep when I got in. The fire was low, down to orange coals. I put a log on, checked the baby, went to bed. Woke maybe an hour later, needing the outhouse. I pulled on my boots and went out the back door. The moon was up, nearly full, and the frost across the yard was bright and sharp in the light. I could see everything clearly. The wood pile and its shadow. The outhouse door hanging. It was hanging open the way it always did. The fence posts. The tree line beyond, black and still against the sky. The dog was asleep by the coop. No wind. The air smelled of frost and wood smoke and wet leaves. I was halfway across the yard when I heard Edgar's voice. Peter, come here. There's something I need to show you. It came from the trees. I stopped and looked and there was a figure at the tree line. Right there. Right at the edge where the grass met the first row of pines. Arms at its sides. Not moving toward me. Not waving. Not doing anything a man does when he wants your attention. Just standing there, facing me. Everyone in the village calls me Pete. Has done since I was a boy. Edgar Burroughs had never once called me Peter in his life. But it was his voice. The pitch was right. The tone. The roughness from years of pipe tobacco. It was Edgar's voice coming out of the dark at eleven at night in near freezing cold. Edgar, who was sixty-three years old, with knees so bad he couldn't walk to the pub without stopping twice to rest against the wall by the church. Standing at my tree line. Asking me to come into the woods. My legs would not carry me forward. I said something back. I don't remember the words exactly. Something about being busy, needing to get inside. The figure stood there, didn't shift, didn't turn. The frost between us was bright and flat and nothing crossed it. I walked back to the house. I wanted to run. My neck was prickling and I wanted to run but I didn't. And I went through the door and slid the iron bolt home and stood with my hand still on it. Not moving for a while. In bed I couldn't sleep. Mary was beside me, breathing slow, one arm up. I looked at her. She was right next to me. Not moving at all. She was right next to me, breathing slow, one arm up. I looked at her arm under the pillow. Thomas in the crib, making that small wet sound babies make. The room smelled of wool. I stared at the ceiling beams and went through it again. The voice. The figure not on the path, not walking toward me, not doing anything a real man would do if he wanted your attention at night. Just standing there at the edge of the trees. I lay there trying to find a normal reason for it. None of them worked. I knew that. I'd known it standing in the yard with the frost under my boots. I just wasn't ready to say so yet. In the morning I went to the village and found Edgar outside the general store, leaning on his stick in his same brown coat. I told him he'd been out late. He looked at me sideways. Said he'd been in bed since eight. Hadn't stepped outside after dark in weeks. He wasn't lying. You could see it in his face. Edgar was a plain man. Didn't know how to make a lie sit still. I said I must have been mistaken. He said the cold does funny things at night. I went home. That night I checked the door latch before bed. Then checked it again. I'd never done that before. Not once in two years. Mary was watching me from the bed by candlelight and she didn't say anything. She saw something in my face and left it alone. I got into bed and lay there listening to the house. The wood ticking as it cooled. The draft under the door. The dog shifting on his chain in the yard. Nothing else. The next night I used the chamber pot. Told Mary I didn't want the cold. She didn't ask. Sometime past midnight the dog started growling. Low and steady, not a bark, a sound from deep in his chest that I could hear through the bedroom wall. I lay in the dark beside Mary and listened to it go on. Ten minutes, the same note, never rising, never breaking. Then it stopped. No bark after, no whine. Just silence. In the morning I went out to him. He was pressed flat against the house wall as far from the tree line as the chain would go, the chain pulled straight. His water was untouched. His food from the night before was still in the dish. He wouldn't eat. Wouldn't look at the yard. Ears flat, eyes on the ground, his whole body drawn in tight. He stayed that way all day. A week went by with nothing. The frost came every morning and I worked through it. I split the last of the winter wood out by the south wall, swinging the axe until my palms were raw and the sweat cooled on my back in the cold air. The logs smelled of wet oak and iron. Mary washed Thomas' blankets and hung them on the line and they froze before they dried, stiff as boards, the fabric cracking when she brought them in. We slept. I went to the outhouse during the day and used the chamber pot after dark and I did not go into the yard at night. The dog went back to normal after three or four days, started eating again, slept by the woodpile on the hard-packed dirt with his nose on his paws. Whatever he'd seen or smelled or sensed, he seemed to have let it go. I wanted to let it go too. Late October, the nights got long. By five, the light was gone and the dark settled in and stayed. I'd come inside from the last of the day's work with numb hands and mud on my boots, bolt the door, build the fire up for the evening. We had a stone fireplace in the front room, wide and deep, the stones blackened from years of use. I'd lay two good logs across the iron grate, pack kindling underneath, light it with a taper and kneel there blowing until the flames took hold. Mary would sit near the fire with Thomas in her lap, the baby's face orange in the firelight. I'd sit across from her in the chair by the window. We'd talk. The room would be warm. It was a night like that, the last week of October when I saw it. Mary had taken Thomas to bed maybe an hour before. The fire had burnt down to coals that pulsed orange and white when the draft caught them. I got up to feed it, knelt on the hearthstone warm through my trousers, took a log from the stack by the wall, a piece of oak, heavy, the bark rough and damp against my hands, laid it across the coals, adjusted it with the poker until it sat flat. The bark caught first, blackening and curling away from the wood. A line of flame found the underside. The log started to tick and pop where the moisture was trapped inside. I watched it, staring at the fire the way you do when the house has gone quiet. Then I looked up at the window. There was a figure standing at the tree line. Same spot, same place where Edgar's voice had come from two weeks before. A shape, upright, facing the cottage. The fire arrives all at once. Because you don't simply step into the season, you create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. 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Sparks went up the chimney. The shape at the tree line stood there. No movement. No sound. I looked down to set the poker on the hook. Two seconds. Looked back at the window. Gone. The tree line was dark and empty. I hadn't heard a footstep, a branch, anything. It was there, and then it was not. In the morning, I went out to check. The frost was heavy that day. Thick and white across the whole yard. The grass was stiff with it. My boots left deep wet prints as I crossed toward the trees. Right at the edge where the grass met the first row of pines, there were tracks in the frost. A set of boot prints coming out of the woods in a straight line to the spot where the figure had stood. The prints stopped there. Then a second line going back into the trees, the same even stride. The prints. Were deep. Deeper than mine. And perfectly spaced. Every step the same distance apart. No variation at all. As if whatever made them had walked to that spot and walked back without once adjusting its pace or its direction. In the dark. Over uneven ground. Never veering. I went inside. I didn't tell Mary. Three nights later it was back. Same spot, same posture. I saw it from the window while banking the fire for the night, raking the coals flat with the poker and covering them with ash so they'd hold until morning. I watched the shape at the tree line for as long as my eyes would stay open. It didn't move. I went to bed. In the morning the tracks were there again. The same perfect stride. Whatever made those tracks had walked to the wall where Mary and I slept. I had not heard a thing. Right up to the street. The stone below the bedroom window. Standing there. Then turning and walking back. I never heard anything cross the yard in the night. No weight on the frozen ground. No creak of the fence gate. Nothing. I didn't tell Mary about the marks. Edgar came by one afternoon in early November. I knew something was wrong before he sat down. He was pale and he kept turning to look back toward his own property. Toward the tree line past his cottage. Mary made tea. He held the cup with both hands, his knuckles white around the rim, and he told us. He'd woken in the night to his wife's voice calling his name. His wife had been dead four years. He'd buried her himself in the churchyard in the rain. But the voice was hers, coming from the direction of the woods behind his cottage. He said his hands were shaking so bad, sadly afterward, he couldn't strike a match to light the lamp. He sat in our kitchen with the tea going cold in his hands and looked at me, and I looked at him. Neither of us said the thing we were both thinking. There was no way to say it that didn't sound like madness. Mary was quiet. She didn't ask questions. She filled his cup again and put her hand on his shoulder for a moment and then went to see to Thomas. After Edgar left, I stood in the kitchen by the window, and looked out at the tree line. It wasn't just me. It wasn't something I'd imagined or mistaken in the dark. It was at Edgar's cottage, too. It used different voices. It knew his dead wife well enough to say his name in her voice, and make him get out of bed and go to the window. First week of November. Mary and I were asleep. Thomas was in his crib at the foot of the bed. I woke to the sound of a baby crying. Thomas' cry. The specific sharp rising note he made when he was hungry. The one I'd heard a hundred times. Mary was already sitting up. We'd both heard it at the same moment. We looked at the crib. Thomas was asleep. Mouth slack. Fists curled. Chest rising and falling. Not making a sound. The crying was coming from outside. From the yard, near the woodpile. Our son's exact cry, out there in the cold. Mary leaned over and put her hand on Thomas in the crib. The crying outside stopped. Not faded. Stopped dead. Cut off in the middle of a breath. We sat there in the dark. Mary's hand on the baby. Both of us looking at each other across the bed. Neither of us said a word, and neither of us moved for a long time. The back door was open to the cold, and Edgar was gone. I need to say how we got there. Edgar hadn't come to the village in two days. You'd see him at the general store most mornings. Ten o'clock or so, buying tobacco and a small loaf. Standing at the counter, talking to whoever was behind it. First day he missed. Nobody thought much. Bad knees. Cold morning. The second day, John Aldis mentioned it at the pub, and the table went quiet. I went to his cottage the next morning, with John and his brother. Five minutes along the dirt track between our properties, the frozen ruts hard under our boots, the hedgerow on one side white with frost, the fields flat and grey under a low sky. Edgar's cottage looked the same as always. Stone walls. Slate roof gone dark with moss. The black smoke stain above the chimney from years of peat fires. No smoke that morning. The chimney was cold. Front door unlocked. We went in and the smell was wrong. Not rot, just cold. The kind of cold a house gets when the fire's been out for days, when every wall and chair and blanket has given up its heat and there's nothing left. Gray ash in the grate. His coat on the hook by the door. His walking stick in the corner. The kitchen table had a plate with a piece of bread gone hard and dry, a knife beside it, butter still in the dish with the mark of the blade from the last time he'd used it. His bed was slept in. Blankets pulled back on one side, wool and heavy quilt folded down the way you do when you mean to come back. Then the back door. Open a foot, maybe less. Cold air had been pouring through that gap for two days. The stone floor near the threshold was dark with damp where frost had blown in and melted. And the boots on the mat. He'd walked out in his socks. We followed the tracks from the doorstep. Through the gap in his fence where the gate never closed right, into the trees. Shallow prints, evenly spaced, the weave of the wool pressed into the frozen ground. A steady walking pace, no stumbling, no place where he'd stopped or turned or shifted his weight. A straight line into the pines. John's brother said maybe he'd been confused, taken ill, wandered off in the dark. The pines closed overhead. The frost was thinner under the canopy, but the prints held, still walking. A mile in, we found him. Sitting upright against the base of a pine. Legs out straight, hands in his lap. Nightshirt and grey wool trousers. No coat, no boots, no hat, no gloves. His face was calm. Frost on his eyebrows and on the grey stubble, along his jaw and in the creases of his nightshirt and across the backs of his hands. Frozen, solid. He looked like he'd sat down and never thought to get up. No fear in his face, no pain. Nothing clenched or twisted. The line from his back door to this tree ran straight, a mile, through the woods. And he hadn't broken stride once. We carried him back between the three of us. His body was stiff and heavy, and the frost on his nightshirt melted against our arms. The village buried him two days later, churchyard, beside his wife. The vicar read from the book. People stood around the grave in heavy coats, scarves up, noses red, eyes on the ground. The men who dug the hole had used picks to get through the frozen topsoil, and the sides of the grave were ragged with it. Dirt hit the coffin lid and the sound was flat and went nowhere in the cold air. Nobody said what they were thinking. I tried, pulled John aside after, and told him. I said there is something in the woods. It calls to people at night. It uses voices. I think it called Edgar, and Edgar went. John looked at me for a long time, with nothing on his face. Then he said Edgar was old and confused, and it was a cold night, and people do odd things. He said it gently. He didn't want to hear it. None of them did. Every face at that graveside had the same look. They knew. They weren't going to say it. Winter after that was hard. Dark by four. Light at eight. Fourteen hours of night. The cold kept deepening, week by week, until the frost stopped melting at midday and just sat there on the ground. A permanent white crust that cracked under your boots. Puddles in the ground. Puddles in the track. Froze solid. I broke the ice on the water trough every morning with a stick, a shelf of it grown overnight, and by afternoon it was forming again. People stayed home, doors shut early. The pub was near empty most nights. You'd walk through the village at five and every window was dark and every door was shut and you'd hear nothing but your own boots on the frozen road. It didn't come every night. I need to say that because it matters. If it had come every night, we could have sat up and waited for it. We could have expected it. Or Edgar's voice from the yard saying my name. The dead man's voice, clear as it ever was when he was alive. A man I'd helped carry out of those woods with frost in his eyebrows. Or the baby's cry from near the fence. Thomas's cry. Then nothing. Three days. Five days. A week. No figure. No marks. No sound. We'd start to sleep again. I'd stop checking the windows. Then it would come back. Closer. After a quiet stretch, I went out one morning and the boot marks were against the bedroom wall again, fresh and sharp in the frost right below the window. One night, Mary heard Thomas crying from outside and we went through it again, sitting up, reaching for the crib, finding him warm and asleep and silent. The crying outside cutting off the instant her voice. Her hand touched him. Mary stopped sleeping. Not on the nights it came. On the nights it didn't. She'd lie awake because she couldn't know which night was which. I'd wake at two or three and she'd be on her back, eyes open, watching the ceiling, listening. I had nothing to tell her. I couldn't explain it. I couldn't stop it. I couldn't say it would be alright. December came. I woke and the bed was cold. Her side of the blanket was pulled back and the sheet underneath had gone cold. She'd been gone a long time. I sat up. Dark room. Thomas asleep in the crib, his small chest rising and falling under the swaddle. I reached across and pressed my hand flat on the sheet where Mary had been. No warmth left. I said her name. Nothing. I got out of bed. The floorboards were freezing under my bare feet. I went to the front room. The candle we kept on the shelf. The fire in the grate was dead. Not banged. Not coals. There was no sound. I couldn't hear a word. Not a word. Not a word. and my face. The fire in the grate was dead, not banked, not coals, grey ash, fine and flat, no warmth off the stones. The cottage was cold, all through, every room, every wall. The heat had been gone for hours. I pulled on my boots, went to the front door. Mary was at the washing line, standing in her nightgown, bare feet on frozen ground. Her back to me. Ugh, I hate Mondays. Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm. Taylor Hansen? Nice. Try one. Daydreaming about Fiori's soft Dreamknit fabric? Meet the Halo Essential Wide Leg Pant, designed with Fiori's softest premium stretch Dreamknit fabric. Invest in your happiness with some of the most comfortable clothes on the planet. Get 20% off your first purchase at Fiori.com slash Halo 20. That's V-U-O-R-I dot com slash H-A-L-O 2-0. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. The line ran between two posts about 15 feet from the door, a length of rope sagging in the middle where it had stretched over the years. She was at one end of it. She was hanging laundry. Her arms moved the way I'd watched them move a thousand times. The same rhythm from every wash day since we'd married. Reaching down, lifting something in both hands, draping it over the line. There was no laundry, no basket. Her hands were empty. The line, was empty. She was lifting nothing and draping nothing and smoothing nothing flat and stepping to the next space and starting again. Her nightgown was soaked through with frost from the knees down, the white cotton gone gray and heavy. Her feet were white on the frozen ground, toes colorless, skin tight against the bone. Her breath came out in thin clouds. She did not shiver. She was not hurrying. With the same steady patience she used on a warm morning when the sheets were clean and the water was hot and there was no rush. She looked comfortable. She looked like the sun was out and Thomas was sleeping inside and there was water heating on the stove. I crossed the yard, frost cracking under my boots. She didn't turn. I put both hands on her shoulders. The nightgown was stiff with cold under my fingers. I said her name. She didn't stop. Reach down. Lift. Drape. Smooth. I said it again, louder, close to her ear. Her eyes were open. She was looking at the line. Not at me. Not at the the yard, not at anything. I held her shoulders and said her name over and over. Her hands kept going. Thirty seconds, maybe longer. Then she stopped, hands still halfway through a reach. Why am I outside? Calm, confused but calm. She looked down at her bare feet, at her white toes on the frost, and then back at me. Then the cold hit her, all of it at once. Everything she hadn't been feeling came in and her whole body started to shake. Her teeth chattered so hard I could hear them. She grabbed my arm with both hands and her fingers were freezing through my sleeve and I brought her inside. I wrapped her in the wool blanket from the bed, sat her by the fireplace with her back against the stones. Rebuilt the fire from nothing. Birch strips, split pine, a taper lit from the candle stub on the floor. Knelt on the hearthstone and blew on it, steady, until the pine caught and the birch caught and the first flames started to climb. My hands were shaking too. Thomas was still asleep in the crib. The cottage was cold and dark and the fire was slow. When the heat started coming off the stones I sat across from her. She had the blanket pulled tight around her shoulders, knees up, feet tucked under the wool, one side of her face lit by the fire. She was staring at the flames. I asked her what happened. She woke at ten past three. The house was silent, not quiet. Silent. The wind had stopped. The timbers had stopped settling. The fire had stopped making sound. Every small noise that fills a house at night. The wood cooling. Raft under the door. The roof shifting in the cold. Gone. All of it. At the same time. She said the silence woke her. She lay in the dark and listened to nothing and after a while she got up. She took the candle from the shelf. She went to the attic hatch. She said she didn't decide to go. Her feet took her. She opened the hatch and held the candle up and looked into the dark above. The last thing she remembered. The bottom of the attic ladder. The candle in her hand. The black square of the hatch above her. Then I was shaking her in the yard and her feet were numb and the line was empty in front of her. Nothing between those two moments. Over an hour gone. She didn't know how she got from the hatch to the door. She didn't know how she got to the washing line. She didn't know why her hands had been moving. I didn't know either. She asked me what she'd been doing when I found her. I told her. She looked at her hands in her lap for a long time. Turned them over. Looked at her palms. Then she looked at the fire and didn't say anything else. That morning, after the sun came up and the frost softened on the south-facing ground, I went to the shed. Got the hammer and a fistful of iron nails. Dragged the chair to the hallway. Stood on it and nailed the attic hatch. Four nails, long ones, through the wood into the frame. The hammer blows were loud in the quiet cottage. Mary stood below me holding Thomas against her chest, his face pressed into her shoulder. She watched me drive each nail and neither of us said a word. There was nothing to say. We didn't understand what had happened. I nailed the hatch shut because it was the only thing I could do. She was walking. Bare feet on white ground. Thomas held against her chest. She was walking toward the trees in a straight line. The same line Edgar had walked. The pines were dark ahead of her and she didn't slow down. I was behind her calling her name. She didn't turn. I could see the back of her nightgown, the hem dragging in the frost. The baby's small face over her shoulder. The trees getting closer. I called and called and my voice made no sound and she walked into the pines and was gone and I couldn't move. I woke up, reached for her. Cold sheets. Out of bed. The crib was empty. The swaddle folded back, still holding the shape of him. I touched it. Cold. The front door was open. The same gap. A foot. December air steady through it. I went to the doorway and looked out. The yard was white under a half moon. The gate was open. Tracks in the frost. Her bare feet. One set of prints. The same narrow shape I knew from the morning after the trance. The heel and the spread of her toes pressed clean into the white ground. But the crib was empty and she had Thomas. The tracks crossed the yard in a straight line. Through the gate. Past the fence. Into the trees. No wandering. No stopping. No place where she'd paused or hesitated at the tree line. A straight line from the front step to the pines. I went after them. No boots. No coat. No lantern. I stepped onto the hard ground and the cold went through the soles of my feet and up into my ankles and I walked. The frost was hard and sharp. Every stone and rut pressing through my skin. I crossed the yard. Through the gate. Past the fence. Into the trees. Dark. The moonlight came through in broken pieces where the canopy thinned. Pale patches on the frost between the trunks. Her prints on the ground ahead of me. Clear. Leading deeper. I followed them. Called her name. Nothing came back. Called again. Louder. The cold was in my chest and my feet were going numb and I kept walking because the prints kept going. I went further than I'd ever been in these woods. Past the tree where we'd found Edgar. Past where the tracks from the tree line had always come from on those mornings I'd checked the frost. The pines were older here. Thicker. Trunks wider than I could reach my arms around, bark rough and black. The ground was frozen hard into ridges and hollows and my feet were numb to the ankles. I couldn't feel them anymore. Then the clearing. The trees opened up. A space maybe thirty feet across where the canopy broke and the moonlight came down full on the frost. Bright and white across the open ground. Mary's tracks led in from the south. So did others. The ground was covered in footprints. Dozens. Bare feet pressed into the frost in every direction. All sizes. Some narrow. Some wide. Some so small they could only belong to a child. They crossed and overlapped and circled and doubled back and paced the edges and came back to the center. The frost was trampled and churned into a maze of prints and Mary's tracks walked into the middle of them and were gone. I couldn't tell which were hers. I got on my knees, bent close to the ground. Tried to find the prints I'd been following. Gone. Lost in the rest. I crawled forward on my hands and knees with my fingers in the frost. Looking at print after print, trying to match the shape of her heel, the spread of her toes, the stride I'd followed for a mile. I couldn't. Too many bare feet. Too many overlapping tracks. Too many people who had walked into this clearing before her. Some prints were old. Frost had partly filled them in. Edges soft. Toe marks blurred to shallow dents. Some were sharp and fresh, the grain of skin still pressed into the frost. Some were large. A man's foot. Some were narrow. Some were so small. Not one set led back out. Now at Kroger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill-up. Same points, more choices. And with low prices, on fresh, quality food, plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop, your dollar goes further. Redeem your points online or in the app. Kroger. Fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. Seaside or store for details. Old cap finds a new scarf. I stood up. The trees were dark on every side. Pines close and black and still. Moon above the broken canopy. No sound. No voice. No crying. Nothing. The clearing and the prince and the cold and my wife and my son lost somewhere in that churned ground among all the others. I stood there until the sky turned gray. stood there while the grey spread and the stars went out and the first morning light came through the pines, low and pale. The frost softened at the edges. The prints started to blur. I watched them go, all those footprints filling in and rounding off and sinking back into the white ground. I couldn't leave. I was still there when the men found me, John Aldous and his brother. They'd seen the front door at dawn and followed the tracks. They came into the clearing and I was standing in the middle of it, barefoot, no coat, feet white, hands at my sides. They brought me back. I couldn't walk. My feet were white to the ankles and dead to feeling. They carried me between them the way we'd carried Edgar out of these same woods. I didn't say a word. When we got to the cottage, the fire was out and the crib was empty and the bed was cold. I saw my son in a market town the following autumn. I hadn't left the parish since December. I needed seed for the spring planting and there was no one else to send. Half a day by cart on bad roads, ruts dried hard from summer, hedgerows brown and yellow. The town was loud with the harvest market. More people than I'd seen in a year. Stalls packed along the main street, livestock pens on one side, carts and wagons on the other. People everywhere. Shoulder to shoulder, moving between the stalls. I hadn't been in a crowd in months. The noise and the press of bodies was hard to bear. I was at a stall near the church buying seed when I looked across the street. A woman I didn't know, standing at a cloth merchant's table. She had a child on her hip, held with one arm, the baby's face over her shoulder, facing me. The right age, 13 months, maybe 14. The right size, the right colouring. And the child was looking at me. Not drifting. Not passing over the way babies look at strangers. Looking at me. Still and steady and fixed. The way Thomas used to watch me from Mary's arms when I came in from the fields. I knew my son's face. I knew it. I put the seed down. Stepped into the street. A cart was crossing between us. A flat wagon stacked with crates, pulled by two horses. And I had to wait for it to pass. Three seconds, four, and when it cleared, the woman had moved. She was walking away from the stall into the crowd with the child still on her hip, still facing me over her shoulder. I went after her. The street was packed, bodies on every side. I pushed between two men carrying a half-side of pork between them on a pole. Stepped around a pen of sheep that had been pulled into the road. A woman with a handcart blocked the way and I went around her. I kept my eyes on the back of the woman's head. She was twenty feet ahead, then thirty. The crowd was thick and slow and I couldn't move through it fast enough. I shoved past a knot of men standing in the road. One of them grabbed my arm and said something. I pulled free. She turned a corner past the bakery. I reached the corner ten seconds behind her. The side street was just as crowded. Market day, every lane full, people and livestock and carts filling the space wall to wall. I looked for her. Searched every woman carrying a child. Pushed down the street checking faces, turning people by the shoulder, looking at every baby on every hip. She was gone. The crowd had taken her. I went up and down that street four times. I went back to the main road and searched there. I asked people. A woman with a baby, dark hair, this tall. Nobody had seen her. Nobody remembered. There were hundreds of women at that market and dozens of them had children and the one I was looking for had walked around a corner ten seconds ahead of me and she was gone. I searched for an hour. I went through every street in that town. I looked at every face. I didn't find them. I bought the seed. Drove the cart home. The light was going by the time I reached the parents. I went to the parish. The cottage was dark. I lit the fire and sat in the chair by the window and watched the tree line until I couldn't see it anymore. I went back to the market town the next autumn. And the one after that. Every harvest. I'd walk the streets. Look at every woman carrying a child. Look at every child walking on its own. Stand at corners watching faces go past. I never found them. There were hundreds of women at that market. Nobody remembered. Nobody remembered. I looked at every street in that town. I looked at every child walking on its own. We've reached the end. I'm Rex. I know time is the most valuable thing you have and the fact that you chose to spend an hour of it here in the dark with me. I don't take that for granted. If you want to be here for the next one, make sure you're subscribed. Until then, stay safe. Take care. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill up. And with low prices on fresh quality food plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop your dollar goes further. Kroger, fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. See site or store for details. Daydreaming about Fiori's soft Dream Knit fabric? Meet the Halo Essential Wide Leg Pant designed with Fiori's softest premium stretch Dream Knit fabric. Get 20% off your first purchase at fiori.com/halo20. That's V-U-O-R-I dot com slash H-A-L-O-2-0. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions.